Page 165 of Ruthless Sin
“A ty, Konsel’yere. Ty stoyal u dveri. Bonus. Morozov tri goda zhdal etot razgovor.” And you, Consigliere. You were standing at the door. A bonus. Morozov has been waiting three years for this conversation.
He means Alexei. Three years. The same three years I have carried the concrete room. The same three years I have not said her name out loud to anyone.
The voice comes out quiet.
“Ya tozhe zhdal.” I have been waiting too.
Sokolov stops at the door. Hand on the handle. He turns back. His voice drops into something older. Something I have heard before in a different room.
“Tell her when you see her. Morozov dripped digoxin into her father’s tea for three months. The girl was ten. She brought him the tea herself. She sat beside him while he died.”
My chest goes through the floor a second time.
She brought him the tea. She sat beside him. She was ten years old and she sat beside him while Alexei’s poison moved through his blood and she did not know. She has been carrying that without knowing.
I keep the face. I keep everything locked.
He smiles.
“Yesli ne khochesh’, chtoby ya tronul devushku, ty zagovorish’ kogda ya vernus’.” If you do not want me to touch the girl, you will talk when I come back.
My eyes stay on him. My face stays still.
He goes out. The door closes.
The bulb is yellow.
I sit.
My chest moves wrong. My breath won’t go right. My hands at the wrists stop feeling like mine and I cannot stop it and then —
Yelena across from me. The cigarette. The knife at her throat. The blood at the corner of her mouth. The concrete cold through the chair. The smell of her blood on the floor.
The humming.
Stop.
My body doesn’t stop. My shoulders tear against the restraints and the pain in my back opens and I slam back into the chair on purpose, my head hitting the back, and the pain in my ribs goes through my chest like something real, like something that is happening right now, tonight, in this room, and I hold onto it because it is the only thing that is only tonight.
Uno. Due. Tre. Quattro. Cinque.
The watch is on my wrist.
A pop. Distant. Through the steel door. Not a gunshot. The wrong shape for a gunshot in this room. The shape of a gunshot in a hallway.
Then another. Closer.
Then voices.
Cristo.
Marco. He is in this building.
Renzo’s voice through the wall, low. “Quella prima. La donna. La incinta.” Her first. The woman. The pregnant one.
He has gotten to Oksana.
A door opens not far away. Oksana’s door. Renzo’s voice drops into something careful, something low and steady, the kind of voice that says you are safe without saying the words.
